Energy-efficient envelope design for high-rise residential buildings in Malaysia

With the development of the economy in recent years, Malaysia has been maintaining high economic growth and therefore, its energy consumption has increased dramatically. Air conditioning for cooling accounts for more than 45% of the total electricity used in the residential sector. This article uses Ecotect software to analyse building envelope design on energy cooling load for a residential building in Penang, Malaysia, which includes the area ratio of window to wall, exterior wall thermal insulation, different categories of glazing and several kinds of shading system. This article describes an integrated passive design approach to reduce the cooling requirement for high-rise apartments through an improved building envelope design. Compared with the other passive strategies investigated in this article, the results indicate that exterior wall thermal insulation is the best strategy to reduce both cooling energy load and peak cooling load that achieve a reduction of 10.2 and 26.3%, respectively. However, all the other passive strategies applied also have marginal effects on decreasing the cooling load.